By mid-February, thousands of Central American migrants were amassing on the U.S.-Mexican border, hoping that President Biden would be more welcoming.
It’s an early test of how the new president will handle immigration, which will be a big change from the Trump administration.
“It is going to be a big shift in tone,” says Ariel Ruiz of the Migration Policy Institute. “The Biden administration is going to elevate and prioritize humanitarian rights for immigrants in the United States and for migrants seeking asylum.”
Fundamentally, President Biden sees immigrants as a critical part of the American identity, whereas the Trump administration enacted policies that significantly restricted all forms of immigration.
On Biden’s first day as president, he issued executive orders to end the travel bans from majority-Muslim countries, to stop construction of the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, and to protect DACA recipients from deportation. (DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, protects young people who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children.) Biden also sent a major immigration reform bill to Congress, including a call to create a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally. This bill, however, faces a tough fight in Congress.
All this sends a signal that there will be a big shift in how immigration is treated. But that more welcoming signal has already started to create a new problem. Thousands of families have begun to cross the border in hopes that their asylum claims will now be considered.
These developments put the Biden team in a bind.
“They’re trying to enact progressive immigration policies while at the same time avoiding triggering new migration flows,” Ruiz says. “It’s a conundrum for the Biden administration.”